This paper explores a collection of letters that brought my mother and me together when physical distance separated us and, twenty years later, brought us some measure of togetherness in the face of dementia’s erosions. I worked as a volunteer teacher in post-war Uganda from 1986 to 1989, communicating with family and friends almost exclusively by handwritten letters. My mother promised to be my most faithful correspondent and she was. When my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2005, I knew that the more than two hundred letters we had exchanged in the 1980s would offer a version of her life before dementia’s processes began. This paper examines how reciprocity, relationality, interrupted presence, space-time, identity, gift, and voice resonated throughout 2007–8, when I used the letters as memory prompts during my weekly visits with my mother. The memory project extended the letters’ already complex temporality by juxtaposing two worlds: the cross-cultural world my mother and I were navigating in the late 1980s, and the unpredictable world of dementia care, where the letters sometimes elicited profound engagement, and sometimes—by their very epistolary nature—failed to bridge the unfamiliar distances opening up between my mother and me.
as on so many other occasions, Greer manages to "get under the skin" of empire-or, perhaps, under its feathers-to probe its inner logic and parse its long-term legacies. The book is a revised doctoral dissertation, so it can, at times, read like a parade of salutations to the thinkers who have influenced its author. Many of the pages in Red Coats and Wild Birds abound with concepts-du-jour and buzzwords set off in quotation marks. Without constant recourse to the citations, it can be difficult to disentangle the points where Greer is innovating from the places where she is relying on other scholars' terms and notions. The following sentences from the first chapter exemplify this tendency: "These interventions help to conceive the stuffed bird specimens in my study not as 'discrete entities' but as material forms 'bound into continual cycles of articulations and disarticulation' that have the potential to reveal other histories, which include the 'lived culture' of the animals in question" (13). Greer is a very talented writer and an immensely capable thinker; her editor should have encouraged her to trust the power of her own authorial voice. This minor quibble aside, Red Coats and Wild Birds is a fascinating study by a scholar whose work will undoubtedly influence our perceptions of the British Empire. Among Greer's many innovations is her convincing expansion of what she calls the "avian imperial archive" (12). By transcending the limits of textual sources and venturing deep into the realm of material culture, she greatly magnifies her (and our) analytical reach. Greer's stories are replete with the paraphernalia of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities; stuffed bird specimens, feathers, eggs, nests, sketchbooks, cameras, and field journals cover every available surface. Yet Red Coats and Wild Birds does not exhibit the forlorn patina of a neglected museum case. Instead, Greer's lively prose and fresh ideas keep readers aloft for the duration of a colorful journey across the British Empire.
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